


Iridescent

by elle_stone



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, First Kiss, M/M, Past Jasper Jordan/Maya Vie - Freeform, Photography
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-01
Updated: 2018-07-01
Packaged: 2019-05-31 14:46:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,196
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15121700
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elle_stone/pseuds/elle_stone
Summary: He knows already what the images will show: the profile of a young man in his twenties, hair growing slightly long over his ears, gaze distant, his hands placed one on top of the other in his lap... He knows what the images will show but he cannot be certain, yet, if there will be present in them the spark of something else that he sees, something beyond the quiet handsome face, the dark brown of the boy’s eyes, the neutral curve of his lips. What Jasper sees, what he senses, is not there in his sight at all but in the moment of capture, the camera-click. It is there in the great, uncertain lurch of feeling inside him as the rest of the world fades and quiets and the boy in the site of the camera lens comes to life.Jasper takes up photography in the wake of Maya's death, and in the process makes a new friend. A Modern AU.





	Iridescent

**Author's Note:**

  * For [jessamurphy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/jessamurphy/gifts).



> This fic was written for jessamurphy/jasprjordamn on tumblr, who asked for a Jasper/Monty photography AU back in _January_ but it took me four months to pin down my vague ideas for it and another two to actually write the thing and anyway, here it is, belatedly. 
> 
> Full prompt: "jasper is working on a photography project and shoots people on the street (i mean takes their picture) and thus he meets monty and then things happen"

I.

 _You should try something new_ , his therapist says. Her voice is mellow and low, like the drift of soft new snow building against the outside window ledge. Coming down again. It's almost Christmas, and the house next door has cheery red and green and yellow lights strung around its windows, blinking in the early winter dusk. _You need to get out of your own head._

Out of his head. Out of his head and his repetitive thoughts, out into the real world again. That’s the refrain. It's been almost a year. One full year at the New Year. He taps his heel against the plush floral carpet and makes no sound.

_Jasper? Are you listening?_

Later he'll walk outside and cross the short way to his car, over the frozen crunch of grass, over the thin layer of snow that's already sticking to the ground. He'll feel the cold, round, wet flakes of it on the back of his neck and on his ears. He'll shove his hands deep in his pockets. The neighborhood will be very quiet and the sky above a deep pure black pierced with tiny diamonds of stars.

_Yeah. I'm listening. Like a hobby._

_Exactly_. Smiling that warm smile like they're getting somewhere. The room is well lit with an overhead and three extra standing lamps and all the furniture is overstuffed. He likes to scan the bookshelves behind her shoulder. He can read the spines, even the old and lightly etched ones, even from this distance and though he's memorized them by now, the habit soothes him. 

 _You can't keep hiding from the world_ , she's saying. 

He breathes out hard through his nose and curls his fingers around his knees, turns away so he's looking down at the pattern of ferns on the carpet, crushed there underneath his right foot. How long has he been coming here and she still thinks he's hiding? What he's looking for is some respite from the world, and all its screeching angry sounds, startling him, shaking him out of his skin. Its uncertain people on the street. A bit of memory here, the odd reminder there: not just her old hair ties left next to the bathroom sink or the novel she was reading shoved in the bedside table drawer but the girl on the street wearing a sundress just like hers, a voice shouting his name and he turns and she's not there—that's the world. Threats and memories.

If only he could learn how to hide, more completely and more certainly, to make himself invisible even to himself, he'd be all right. But that’s just not something he knows how to explain.

*

The snow keeps coming and coming and he almost doesn’t make it home for the holidays. He almost doesn’t want to make it home. Last year at this time he and Maya were doing the meet-each-other’s-parents thing: she complimented the wreath on his dads’ front door and charmed them both by playing the out-of-tune piano in their living room. This year he’s sitting in the dark in their driveway, next to the car they’ve left all but buried beneath the unending snow, with a hole between his ribs so raw and so empty he’s afraid to go inside, sure that they’ll be able to see.

They don’t, but Christmas dinner is still awkward.

On New Year’s Eve, his dad takes him up to the attic, _to help me finally clear some of this old crap out_ , and they find an old camera in among the family photo albums and a clutter of paperback books. _Mine from college. Believe it or not, I used to be pretty good._  

Jasper turns it around in his hands. He only has a few pictures of Maya, and his favorite is a selfie they took out on the terrace of the café, the bright glare of the sun bleaching out the edge of the frame, and both of them laughing, her hand half-raised like she’s about to knock his phone out from his hand. It isn’t a _good_ picture. But it’s her, Maya as full of life and as brilliant with joy as he could ever remember her being.

 _You should take it_ , his dad says. He puts his hand on Jasper’s shoulder and gives it a squeeze. Distances fall, collapse, then widen again. He closes his eyes for a moment, breathes in the attic scent, all wood and dust.

 _Get some use of it, maybe_ , his dad is saying.

_Like a hobby?_

_Yeah. Just something fun to do._  

 

 

II.

Mostly he shoots around Walden: a home court advantage against his anxiety. The neighborhood is full of students and artsy types. They come for the thrift stores and bookshops and the little hole in the wall that still sells vinyl; they stop in at the café for lattes and muffins—he knows the look of them well. His photographs become landscapes of them. Most of the time he doesn't know what he's looking at, or who, until after the pictures are developed and he can sit cross-legged on his bed and stare, shifting through prints: her long scarf, his tall boots, the reflection of the setting sun glinting in the bookshop windows, a huddle of people on the bench beneath the bus stop sign. 

A long, snowy winter melts away slowly into a long, cool, rainy spring. Stubborn drifts of dirty snow cling to the sidewalk edges. Clusters of deep gray clouds block out the sun most days, and the students kick their way through slush and huddle in their heavy coats. 

It's right about then that Jasper first starts noticing him. 

He's probably a student and he's at the bus stop two, three times a week, dressed in at least four layers with the sleeves of his hoodie pulled down over his hands, his backpack in his lap; sometimes he's reading but usually he's just looking out into the street, watching people or thinking, looking at people, looking through them. He wears dark green sneakers and twice Jasper catches him sitting with the soles leaning up against each other; he thinks this makes the boy's feet look thoughtful. He thinks that's a weird thing to think and doesn’t mind.

The boy shows up in the photos again and again. Like a ghost, Jasper would think. If ghosts were real. 

*

In March he signs up for a class at the community college—just as something, maybe fun, to do—and for his first assignment is told to photograph someone he'd like to get to know.

So he waits out by the bus stop with his camera around his neck, waits through the long slant of a slow late-afternoon. The pavement has darkened with another recent rain, and the air is still sharp with winter chill. He doesn't feel nervous, mostly just numb, except that he keeps shifting his weight between his feet. 

When the bus arrives, a small crowd of passengers disembarks. The boy with the green sneakers and the hoodie steps off last, and as he does, he hitches his backpack higher up on his shoulder. His gaze is focused mostly on the curb. Jasper's breath catches. These are the nerves, then, catching up to him. The feeling jolts in him but remains distant: a loud crash of waves but on a shore he cannot see.

_Hey._

_Hey, excuse me—_

"Excuse me, hey—sorry."

His fingers catch on the boy's sleeve, and he turns. He looks directly at Jasper and Jasper finds he cannot help but look directly back. A few people jostle by them. Jasper's balance barely holds. The boy doesn't say anything, only watches him.

"This is a weird request, but." He clears his throat and holds his camera up. "Could I take your picture? It's for a class."

Still the boy doesn't answer. The last of the bus crowd disperses around them, and the bus moves back into traffic with a lurch of exhaust. Across the street, a little kid in a raincoat he doesn't need is splashing through the puddles in the gutter. The moment that Jasper watches the kid, in his red rain boots, laughing, and that he is watched in turn, seems to stretch out long and taught and tense, a handful of seconds he can almost hear ticking by in his own head.

"Okay,” the boy answers finally. “Sure. Um." He shoves his hands in his pockets, and his eyes dart at last from Jasper's face, scanning across the sidewalk and the storefronts. "Like, here?"

"Here's fine. It won't take long. Thanks, by the way." They walk over to the bus stop bench and the boy sits down toward the end. He takes his backpack off and sets it down next to him, one arm resting on top, then shifts both hands down to his lap, fidgets his feet, like he's aware of his body for the first time or in a new way; he looks awkward but he’s trying, and Jasper adds, "It's nice of you. To help me out." 

"It's not a big deal," the boy answers, and he glances up at Jasper with a thin smile. "I don't mind."

On another day or at a slightly different moment, Jasper thinks—and the thought comes with the force of realization, but dulled—the boy would have said no. He probably came close even now to just walking away. Maybe he’s sitting there, hyper-aware of his shoulders and his hands and his feet, wondering why, in that one instant, instead of whatever polite excuse was on his lips, he said _okay_.

"How should I... what should I do?" he asks. There's an amused, self-deprecating trill in his voice. He crosses his arms, then uncrosses them.

"Just sit," Jasper answers. "However you normally would. Try and pretend I'm not here."

He raises his camera and frames his shot, and the boy laughs, tight and low, laughter he swallows before it's quite fully formed. "Easier said," he mumbles. 

But after a moment, a deep breath to fill his lungs and an exhale, he settles. Jasper watches that jittering nervousness leave him, slowly and by degrees, and an unexpected calm take its place. The first two or three shots he snaps off without thinking. He sees the calm, he sees the moment form, and he reacts.

He knows already what the images will show: the profile of a young man in his twenties, hair growing slightly long over his ears, gaze distant, his hands placed one on top of the other in his lap. The city street in the background, dull and soft and smudged beneath a cover of spring clouds. The bus stop sign, and a few out of focus pedestrians, striding past. He knows what the images will show but he cannot be certain, yet, if there will be present in them the spark of something else that he sees, something beyond the quiet handsome face, the dark brown of the boy’s eyes, the neutral curve of his lips. What Jasper sees, what he senses, is not there in his sight at all but in the moment of capture, the camera-click. It is there in the great, uncertain lurch of feeling inside him as the rest of the world fades and quiets and the boy in the site of the camera lens comes to life.

It's been a long time since he focused in so closely on the minute details of another person. A long time since he has thought so discreetly and so simply about angles and eyelashes and skin. He is moved by the tiniest particulars, like the soft, worn fabric of the boy’s shirt, or the dark, thoughtful color of his eyes.

Jasper senses that he has ceased simply to _exist_ in this life, a life which has continued on like an echo even after the source of sound has passed, and has become present within it again. A flame has been lit in that hollow space between his ribs. At first, it frightens him. (It has been so long, such a long time.) He finds himself hesitating over the moment when the boy inclines his head, and a breeze gusts past them both and ruffles his hair out of place. This handful of seconds scatters, and an imperfect aftermath is captured in its place. But that is okay. Jasper lets out a breath held too long, too tense, in his lungs.

Though it’s perhaps too late for introductions, he says, “I’m Jasper, by the way,” just to test out the sureness of his voice.

The boy turns on instinct, surprised by the unexpected sound, and for a second Jasper has a perfect face-on shot of clear, wide-eyed confusion and uncertainty. This time he grabs it, fast and sure, with an instinct of his own. 

 _Click_.

A moment later, it’s gone; the boy is laughing.

“You did that on purpose,” he’s saying. “You did that on purpose so I’d look at you.”

Jasper keeps on shooting, because the sight of the boy's incredulous giggles ignites something like a burst of pure joy in his heart. The boy’s shoulders lift and shake and his eyes all but close; his smile widens into a bright grin—Jasper doesn’t know exactly what will come of these shots, but he imagines he’s creating a flipbook of laughter, and he doesn’t want to lose a single frame. The rest of the world, the dingy background of the overcast gray and brick street, washes away. Existence narrows down, down to just the boy’s smiling face, and stays there in perfect focus, for a handful of spring-bloom seconds in which Jasper would like to live for as long as this earthly life lasts.

The boy is still smiling when Jasper puts his camera down. "I'm Monty," he says, and holds out his hand. "By the way."

His skin is cool and a little rough and Jasper doesn't want to let go. As soon as he does, Monty puts his hands in his pockets and hunches up his shoulders. Jasper's throat closes up. His tongue feels too dry and heavy and he doesn't have any idea what to say. He wonders if Monty can see the raw, exposed parts of him that feel so suddenly and so completely on display: the hollow space, the sputtering light, the anxious tremor in his bones.

"Thank you, Monty," he manages at last. He's not sure how long the pause dragged on—Monty's smile is more tenuous, but hasn't fallen from his face—and he needs an excuse to talk. To say the name. "I think I got some good shots."

"I hope so. Hey, would you—would you mind sending me copies?" he asks, with a sudden, buoyant touch, as if the question had just popped into his mind. "At least—of the best ones?" 

Jasper hesitates a moment, not because he doesn't want to talk to the boy again, but because he truly _does_ , and the wanting makes his stomach pitch and twist like it’s at sea. He clears his throat and what comes out is, "Um, all right. Sure." 

Monty's already unzipping his backpack. He pulls out a spiral notebook and a cheap black drugstore pen. 

"They're not digital," Jasper adds. "I mean—I’m making prints. But I can scan them. If you want me to email them to you."

Monty's bent over his notebook, halfway through writing out something large and uneven across the center of the page. He glances up. "Is that going to be a hassle for you?"

"No." Jasper shakes his head. "No, it's okay."

Monty hesitates another second, then finishes writing, and yanks the paper free with a jagged, ripping sound. He hands it over. His handwriting is unexpectedly neat and probably, Jasper thinks, it usually flows easily across the lines of a page. But he's printed his name and email in outsized letters, horizontal across the center of the paper, and the effect is a loopy almost-scrawl lilting up toward the top margin like it's reaching for the sky. _Monty Green_ , it says, _mgreen@arkadia.edu_.

"An Ark U address," Jasper notes. "Are you a student?"

"Yeah. Well. Grad student," Monty answers. "In the engineering department. What about you? You said this was for a class, right?"

"Uh, yeah." He folds the paper unevenly and hides it in his inside pocket. This requires unzipping his jacket and maneuvering around his camera, a great excuse not to look up at Monty's face. "Just at the community college, though. I— _was_ in a grad program at Arkadia. But I dropped out. About a year ago."

"Oh." Monty sounds vaguely embarrassed, but he's trying to hide it with a curious little hum behind the word. He keeps talking before any awkward comma can form. "What were you studying? Something in the arts?"

Jasper shakes his head. "No," he answers, as he zips his jacket up again. Monty still hasn't put his pen back and he's holding it in his lap now, Jasper notices, half-unscrewing the cap and then twisting it back into place, over and over. "I was in the Chemistry Department, actually." He half-smiles. It's not funny in any way Monty would understand, but just saying the words flashes him back to a life so long gone and so dull it's like an ancestor's life, something connected to him but ancient, no more real than black-and-white photos in a dusty album on a shelf. Chemistry. Fuck. He hasn't even walked past the building in the past twelve months.

"Chemistry," Monty echoes. If he’s surprised, it’s only in the lightest and most inconsequential way—more curious than anything. He shoves the cap of his pen back on and slips it into his bag, zips it closed. "Why'd you quit?"

Jasper looks up with a sharp jerk of his head, surprised by the simple, abrupt stab of the question. But Monty's face shows nothing but innocent interest. Not trying to accuse, then. Just wanting to know.

"I—"

_Started getting claustrophobic in classrooms?_

_Thought I was better suited to making sandwiches and serving coffee?_

_Just couldn't find it in myself to care anymore?_

_Missed her too hard?_

"I guess…” he answers, in an even, neutral tone, “I guess I found the whole subject too much of a _mystery_." He keeps a straight face and figures Monty won't even notice the pun, or that he’ll just roll his eyes at it if he does. Maybe he'll even be annoyed, because people are sometimes—his parents, his therapist—when he doesn't take serious questions seriously.

But Monty laughs, a short, round laugh, which startles Jasper even more than the initial question did. "Good one," he says. Then, biting down his smile, he adds, "Honestly, I can't blame you. Sometimes I just want to throw in the towel too. Go off somewhere and—I don't know. Be a farmer?" He shrugs up one shoulder, and hits Jasper with a lopsided, self-deprecating smile.

Jasper feels himself smiling, too, feels that gentle warmth in his middle again. He thinks about Monty’s email address in his inside pocket. He thinks about maybe seeing him, talking to him again.

“Being a farmer doesn’t sound so bad,” he says. His words are almost drowned out by a large SUV passing by. It splashes in the puddles and sprays water across the street. Over Monty’s shoulder, he catches sight of a chaotic group of students, bumping shoulders as they fight their way into the bookstore. “Feels like it would be…simpler.”

The clouds overheard are darkening, sweeping up into clusters again and crowding the sky.

“Yeah. Maybe.” A spot of rain falls on Monty’s hand, and he looks up. “But I don’t know if I’d be any good at it. I think I have to stick to this life I already have.”

*

They meet again the next Friday, at the café just after the end of Jasper’s shift, so that Monty can take a look at the physical prints. Their table is right next to the window, and a wide slash of pale afternoon light falls across it, across Monty’s black coffee and Jasper’s water and the large gray folder where he safeguards the photos. He slides it over, then puts his hands in his lap and lets his nails bite crescents into his skin.

“This feels very covert,” Monty jokes, as he opens it. 

"Mmm," Jasper answers. The heel of his foot taps with manic speed against the floorboards. He's never been nervous to show his photos to anyone before, certainly not to his professor or the other students in his class, strangers whose voices flow to him across the great distance of his own isolation, and the feeling now is as unpleasant as it is unfamiliar, a fever-warmth spreading like an oil spill up the back of his neck. It's never mattered if anyone else likes his work, because it is the process of that work that lifts him up, that provides him with a buffer against the harsh uncertainties of the world. His camera, a shield behind which he can only see, and not be seen. But this time. These photos. He's watched them come to life in the impenetrable black of the darkroom, he's spread them out across the floor in his bedroom, he's run his fingertip around the edges with breath-held care, like he's trying not to set off a bomb. In each one he reads his own awe, his own fascination, his own need. 

Maybe that is what Monty will see, too: not himself but Jasper, the most hidden inner part of him sparking through.

Jasper doesn't watch Monty’s face, only his hands as he flips open the folder and carefully sifts through. His fingers are gentle and his movements slow. Sometimes he hesitates, staring an extra few seconds at one photo, or another; out of the corner of his eye, Jasper sees Monty's head tilt to the side, curious and uncertain.

Jasper takes a long drink of water and over the sound of the ice cubes clinking back into place, Monty says, "These are really good."

"What?" 

He swallows too fast before the word and his throat burns.

"They're good. They're _unexpectedly_ good. Like…kinda beautiful." Monty's looking up at him now, smiling, his fingertips set against the border of an image of his own face. "Maybe that sounds vain... I mean as a photographer, you're talented." He laughs, tries for self-deprecating but it doesn't catch. "Made me look important. Very serious."

Not in all of them, Jasper thinks, but in the first ones, sure: serious, caught in profile, looking out into an unknowable distance. "Thanks," he answers, his voice croaking.  

"Hey, really, you have talent," Monty insists, and reaches out to wrap his fingers around Jasper's arm, just above his wrist. The gesture is so earnest and so unexpected that Jasper feels his breath catch in his throat. He wonders if Monty can feel the shock of it, the after-tremor of it, through his sleeve. Some inescapable lightness buoys in him.

"Now you're just flattering me," he mumbles. The words come out in an exaggerated, flippant tone, like he's trying to be coy, or to play-act coyness, trying to joke, and in the joke to lay bare an awkward truth. That he _is_ flattered. And that the flattery and the fingers around his arm and the insistence of the gesture— _look at me, please look at me_ —feel like they’re skirting around the edges of a come-on. Maybe. He imagines.

And in his answer, he sounds, to his own ears, like he's flirting too.

He looks up and wonders if Monty's reading the situation the same way, half-expects to see a distorted grimace on his face, or at least confusion and retreat. But Monty's expression has turned thoughtful and soft instead. He squeezes Jasper's arm once, then lets go.

"A little," he concedes as he sits back. "And I stand by it." Then he flips over to the next photo and asks, "So which ones are you using for your class?"

"Mmm, that one, I think," Jasper answers, turning over one more shot and tapping at the corner of the next. It's one of the last he took, Monty facing the camera and laughing and warm, his eyes half-closed and nose scrunched up.

"That one?” He makes a disapproving face, and at the same time gives a short shake of his head, like he’s short-circuiting from surprise. “Really? I look silly in that one, though."

"You look happy. I like it. It's the best one." Realizing he's tilted forward too much into Monty's space, he leans back again, and forces a shrug. "But I'll pair it with one of the look-how-serious-I-am-I'm-thinking-deep-thoughts ones from the beginning if you want."

Monty rolls his eyes. "Okay, I flattered you, and now you're mocking me. Won't make that mistake again." He takes a sip of his coffee and stares down at the photo again, tilting it a little as if, somehow, that would help him see in it whatever secret magic Jasper sees. "It's not a bad shot. It's just..."

"What?"

"It's so... personal. Somehow." He closes his eyes and shakes his head, huffs out a short burst of laughter through his nose. "I know it's not _really_ , but—"

“It’s unguarded,” Jasper says. “That’s why you don’t like it, and I do.”

Monty hums, uncertain for a moment, then concedes, "I guess." He flips back to the first photo. "I want them to see Brooding, Mysterious Man at Bus Stop, and you want them to see Laughing Dork."

"Yeah, I really captured something real in that last one," Jasper answers, and Monty gets that he's joking, and laughs. 

That light feeling inside him bubbles up again. Bubbles up and up but doesn't burst.

"How'd you get into this anyway?" Monty asks him, as he closes the folder again and slides it back. "The photography thing? I don't know that many scientists with artsy hobbies like that."

"I'm not a scientist," he corrects. Not anymore, at least. The words have a serrated edge but Monty doesn't flinch. "I'm not an artist either, I just..." He curls his fingers around the edge of the folder. He can hear the rattle of his own breath as he breathes in. "I needed something..." That's not right either, not right. He did need, and he does, but this is just a step, just a stumbling in the dark. That sick-familiar anxious flutter is rocking his thoughts off-center again, and he flinches, grasping for words to give shape to the foggy concept in his mind. "Something different. Some... different way of looking at the world."

His body feels exhausted and wasted thin, as if he'd just run a marathon, when all he managed was a half-formed thought. And it was not even the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but. Monty's nodding like he understands, but Jasper knows he couldn't possibly get it. Not without knowing about the nightmares and the panic and the hollow reverberations of loss.

"I feel that way sometimes too," he's saying. "I mean, just tired of how one-track everything is, because of school. I started keeping plants," he adds, fast, and then shrugs, backing away from himself and the confession.

"Plants?"

"Yeah, like—my parents always had a ton in the house when I was growing up and one day I looked around at my adult life and just felt like...this is too gray. Like there's not enough," he shrugs again, a lopsided guilty smile on his face, "not enough oxygen circling in the room or something. Might have been in the middle of a long project at the time. Anyway, now my apartment looks pretty much like a jungle."

"A jungle." Jasper leans forward with his arms crossed on the table and studies Monty's face like he might never see it again. Like he needs to memorize it, and the photos, even balanced on that edge of revelation as they are, just won't do. "That sounds great. That sounds like the sort of place I'd want to be."

He's not fishing for an invitation but still, Monty takes a pen out of his backpack and grabs the napkin out from underneath his mug. It's slightly crinkled, a coffee-stain ringing the center. "You should come by sometime," he says, as he writes down his number.

“And admire the plants.”

“Yeah.” He pushes the napkin across the table, his fingers bumping up against Jasper’s, and lingering there. “They’d like that.”

*

Jasper sits and listens to the quietest of sounds: the grandfather clock ticking out in the hallway, the remnants of the morning’s rain dripping from the window eaves. He leans the soles of his sneakers together. He stares down at his toes.

There is no question, now, of what he can say, only of everything he cannot: a thousand lightning bugs flickering and flaring in his mind. Like. How the mornings are easier now, and he is relearning how to breathe. How he still thinks about her often, but the memories that rise to the surface are more likely to be sweet than bitter. How he no longer feels guilty when he smiles at the whisper of her name or the ghost of her face. How long it has been since he said to himself, _oh but that Death had taken me_.

He could tell his therapist that people’s voices no longer echo to him as if from a great distance, that shadows and unknown noises no longer seem to loom and threaten wherever he goes. And that emotions feel the right size again, neither too hollow and small, nor too immense and monstrous and gnawing.

Or most emotions, at least.

He could also say _I like a boy_ , because that is what this feels like: something innocent and feather-light, a safe little hollow of feeling, shipped in from an easier and freer time.

 _Just share whatever you're thinking_ , she says. _Tell me whatever's on your mind._

This is what she used to say in their earliest sessions, when he was still frozen and numb in his grief, and if she's dusting off the old words again she must think that he needs them. That that's where he is again. The beginning.  Rambling around in the haunted ghost-house of himself. But that is not the truth. He just doesn't have the words for this tangled vine of feeling wrapping and circling around his heart. He doesn't know what to tell her. There is so much but he does not know.

 _I get it_ , Monty says, when he tries to explain everything, at last, in a few staggered late-that-night texts. _I've never been able to talk about feelings and stuff either._

 _That's the thing tho_ , Jasper answers. _I **used** to be able to. I used to be really good at the whole feelings thing._  

 

 

III.

Monty's apartment really is a jungle, just as he said it would be. Jasper knew about the plants, of course, and he imagined them: a reasonable display, a few green sprigs here and there or some flowers in a vase, but. This is not reasonable. This is an otherworld of green. Everywhere he looks he sees bursts of ferns and spiky cacti and multiplying spider plants, bright spots of annuals in reds and blues and sweet-sunshine yellows, plants in pots and stands and window boxes, on tables and windowsills, plants in the living room and the kitchen and peeking out through the open door of the bedroom at the end of the hall. 

"You really live up to your name," Jasper says, as he runs his palm across the fuzzy leaf of a desert plant, crowded away from the sharpest kitchen light. Monty laughs at this one, too.

"Huh? Oh—yeah, I'm a cliché. I warned you, though. You can't say I didn't warn you."

The kitchen is narrow, and its one window looks out into the alley and the closed blinds of the apartment building next door. But the walls are painted a cheery light yellow, and the wooden counter tops are neatly organized and clean, and the gentle oxygen exhales of the plants fill the small space with a welcome excess of air. He could sit in this kitchen all day. Behind a brief flutter of closed eyelids, he imagines it. He would crack open every window and prop open every door and feel the gentle sway of a breeze ruffle through his hair, just as it ruffles across the draped and dangling leaves of Monty's plant menagerie, and he would feel at ease and _safe_.

"Yeah, but I still wasn't expecting—" He breaks himself off and just smiles. "And I don't think 'warn' is the right word."

 _Warn_ is what you do when you talk about the monsters under the bed, or the nightmares about the monsters under the bed.

There's an overgrown, wild giant of a plant hanging from a ceiling hook, right in front of the window, where the muted sunlight can slide in and shift and shimmer through its leaves. Jasper takes a few steps back to look at it. He wants to examine the iridescent spill of emerald light it throws against the windowsill. He wants to distract himself: from the longing set off within him at the sound of Monty’s laughter and the sight of his smile, from the way Monty comes to stand right next to him, from the way their hands sit together in that pool of tinted sunglow, not quite touching. If he had his camera with him maybe he could take a picture of their hands and that would be a way of speaking. That would be his way of saying _I want so much but cannot move_.

He forces himself to look up. With his other hand, he reaches out and skims his fingertips along the veins, like perfect tiny rivulets, that pop up across the plant’s wide and silky leaves. Monty takes another step closer. His fingertips stub up against Jasper’s, catching for a moment on the surface of the windowsill, and then his hand covers Jasper’s and just rests there.

"This one's my favorite," Monty says. He pitches his voice low and it wafts, drifts, more a thrum in the air that Jasper can feel than words he can hear, until the syllables break apart like dust motes in the sun.

"I thought you weren't supposed to have favorites," he answers.

Monty huffs out a short laugh and, louder this time, his hand squeezing down on top of Jasper's, says, "I don't actually think they're my _children_ , you know. I'm not that crazy." 

Jasper isn't looking at him, couldn't stand the explosion of his heart if he looked at him, but he imagines the sweet upturn of Monty’s smile—something like the expression in the photos, the one he’s memorized, wholly without meaning to. _Crazy_ , he thinks, is a funny word. A word to break out when feeling self-conscious, an exaggeration— _on the continuum of **crazy**_ —and a defense— _but not **that** much_ —to deaden the impact of secrets revealed. Has he invited many people to see his plant collection? Is he still talking, even now, because he's nervous?

"It’s the oldest one," he's saying. "It used to be my parents', but they gave it to me when I mentioned wanting some more plant life around. I still kind of can't believe I haven't killed it. It just keeps growing and growing..." 

He trails off and when Jasper glances over at him, he sees he's half-smiling, in a far off and thoughtful way. His eyes flick to Jasper's, and the smile grows a little wider, more secure. 

"The unstoppable monster plant," Jasper says, and twitches the corner of his mouth up. It's hard, because he wants to be closer, but he cannot move; his hand feels warm and sweaty beneath Monty's palm and his body is too rigid, painfully stuck, his skin too warm in this hothouse, all of him too exposed in the haze of the sun.

Monty just hums, nods. His gaze falls down, and his expression wavers. Jasper sees him take in a deep breath but almost misses the moment, right after, when he steps closer: he catches the pause of contemplation, misses the instant of decision. The balance between them tips and shifts. The balance within him, too. He pulls himself in against the corner of the window sill and pulls Monty with him, his free hand grabbing just above Monty’s elbow until they’re almost nose to nose. Monty’s other hand rests, fingers splayed and slightly bent, against the edge of the window frame.

Jasper is aware of every muscle, every bend in his bones, every detail of Monty’s body close to his, but of nothing more sincerely or more painfully than the intake-outtake of air into his lungs. Rattling, uneven stumbles of air. He tightens his grip on Monty’s arm. 

Later, he will recognize that the moment was only a moment, but at the time, existing in the center of it, safe but scared in the eye of the storm of it, he knew it as a thousand moments. Though no more than a handful of seconds, he experienced it as an eternity, as he waited for the certainty of decision to settle on him, as he hoped for an infusion of bravery to crash over him like a wave.

But then Monty leans in and something breaks. He doesn’t know what it is but it’s inside him and it hurts. He flinches, curls away, and slips out of the embrace.

"Fuck," Monty curses, sharp but under his breath, somewhere behind him as Jasper stares at the counter and the edge of the toaster and waits for the racing of his heart to slow. He doesn't answer and for a long moment, another aching eternity, there is silence. Jasper listens for the tiny cracks and fissures in it: the sounds of Monty's feet shuffling, the creak of a floorboard beneath his heel. When he turns around again, Monty's leaning back against the windowsill, looking down at his shoes.

"Hey, I'm sorry about that," he says, as, just as attuned to Jasper's movements perhaps, he takes just that moment to look up.

"Yeah, the swearing really offended me,” Jasper answers, with another twitch of smile. He's _trying_ , he really is. He's _sorry_. It's just—

"I meant the trying-to-kiss you thing," Monty says, and smiles a thin smile too. "I guess I misread the room. Are you...not into guys or just..." He shrugs. "Not into me? Which is cool, too. I’m just...curious."

Jasper takes a step closer, shoves his hands deep in the pockets of his jeans and pulls his shoulders up, almost a shrug. "It's not that you're a guy and it's not that you're...you. I like you." _Like you so much it's a little terrifying. Like you so much I don't know what to **do** with myself._ "I just...can't."

"Seeing someone else?"

He shakes his head. "More like...my last relationship didn't end so well and I'm...” He closes his eyes, just for a second, then opens them again. “Not sure if I'm ready."

Monty nods slowly, and his shoulders deflate with a long, quiet sigh. "I'm sorry," he says again. His gaze has wandered, listless, away from Jasper's face and to some undefined spot in the middle distance: perhaps the corner of the kitchen table, or the electric kettle next to the stove. Jasper’s not sure. He sounds distant, but sincere. Sorry not in the sense that he fucked up, which, Jasper thinks, he didn't really, but in the global sense: just _sorry_. Sorry about Maya, though he never knew her, doesn't even know of her; sorry that life has taken whatever twists and bumps and turns it has to bring them to this miserable little spot; sorry for the inches of space they've put between them. Sorry that, for now, this is the way things have turned out to be.

*

Two weeks later, he's sitting cross-legged at the end of Monty's couch, trying to explain it all. The window is open, and a warm spring wind is blowing through the curtains, carrying the scent of the window box flowers through the room. Carrying the light easy air of the new season through the room. Jasper holds his phone tight in his hands.

"Her name was Maya," he says, when he hands it over. 

Monty doesn't say anything at first, just looks down at the picture Jasper's pulled up onto the screen: the selfie they took outside the café, both of them laughing, their faces washed out by the blare of the sun. 

"Was," Monty repeats, at last, breaking up a taut length of silence. Then he looks up and adds, "She's pretty. You look really happy together." 

Jasper wonders if the words are hard for him to say. They sound like it: stilted, like the carefully stitched together condolences people offer at funerals. He went to hers, but he didn't stand with her family, shaking hands and accepting apologies. He's pretty sure he would have married her someday—maybe that's just the sort of silly romantic thought that pops into one's brain in the first rush of young love, then solidifies, fossilizes, in the aftermath of tragedy, but he's accepted it now as a facet of his loss—but as it was, he was only the boyfriend. So he sat quietly by himself in the second row, holding his hands pressed tight together, waiting for the rest of the numbness to kick in.

"What happened to her?"

Monty's holding out the phone, and Jasper takes it back carefully, without looking down.

"She died," he answers, because it seems simplest now just to tell the obvious truth aloud.

"I'm sorry. Was it—I mean—how?" Monty's eyebrows dip toward each other. His words trip up his tongue like stumbling blocks. "An accident?"

Jasper shakes his head. He swallows down hard over the lump in his throat and it hurts. "No. Um. Robbery, actually. Convenience store robbery gone wrong. Random act of violence." He sets the phone down on the table and settles his hands back down in his lap. "I was there too but I wasn't even injured. No one else died. It was just...just complete chance. Wrong place, wrong time. Standing in the wrong spot. She died on the scene. I watched her bleed out. I was holding her—"

That’s it; he’s gone; he chokes right up. He knew, from the moment Monty opened the door (he was wearing a faded old t-shirt with the words **Drugs Not Hugs** emblazoned on it, and red plaid flannel pants that made Jasper think of Christmas, and his hair was slightly mussed, like he'd been running his hands through it; he looked a little distracted and a little tired and a little worn around the eyes, but the minute he saw Jasper standing in front of him, he’d ushered him right in with a hand on his arm)—he knew he'd cry, eventually. But he didn't think he'd trip and stumble over his words like this, didn't expect to feel them like heavy square blocks in his throat. He hates each one, but they keep coming. After a while, they calcify completely, and he can only hiccup around some nonsense ( _I miss her, I miss her, it's not real that she's gone_ ), and then he's just struggling to breathe around the tears and the snot, the flood in his lungs.

And then Monty is holding him.

Jasper's legs are still crossed in front of him and Monty doesn't have much room; it's an ill-formed pretzel of an embrace, and Jasper is so slow, so clunky and stiff, that it takes him more than one try to untangle himself. When he manages it at last, he goes limp. He's crying still but quieter now, into the space between Monty's shoulder and his neck, and Monty is holding him so tightly and so fiercely, it doesn't even matter that he's not saying a word. Jasper feels the sympathy and sorrow in him. His nose is pressed up above Jasper's ear. Jasper's breathing jags and he coughs, and Monty holds him closer, and at last, at long last, the tears subside.

"Your shirt," Jasper mumbles, and sniffs, and rubs at the raw hot skin beneath his eye. "It's…false advertising."

"What?"

Monty's voice is so thin that even his confusion barely registers, and Jasper wonders if he’s near tears himself.

"I was—" He pulls in another hard breath through his nose, wishes for a tissue, finds himself coughing instead. "I was expecting some drugs."

It takes another moment, but when Monty realizes what he means, he starts to laugh, not a polite laugh, not a thank-you-for-breaking-the-tension laugh, but a genuine laugh of appreciation and relief. He pulls back, and his hands glide up to the sides of Jasper's face, one thumb easing back and forth at his temple. The gesture is so intimate and so loving that Jasper could almost kiss him, right there.

"Next time," Monty says. "Next time."

*

Later, Jasper tells him the rest: how she died right after New Year's, almost seventeen months ago now, but the wound is still raw and open and real; how he still jumps at unexpected noises and feels his chest tighten in crowds; how he's waiting always for the rest of the story, for a death he worries is certain and close; how he's lost track of himself just as surely as he's lost track of his friends and of time and of reality, sometimes, how he's drifting, how he's scared. He tells him about Maya, too: her fierce kindness and devotion, her smile, her spark. He tells the story of how they first met. He remembers her sense of humor and her love of art and how she always wanted to be better, to be a better person, how hard she was on herself sometimes. He remembers how soft he was with her. He talks for a long time and Monty holds his hand the whole way through: leads him out on that bridge of memory, even though it’s shaky, and unstable beneath his feet, and through to the other side, where he can breathe.

Later still, after the sun goes down, Monty orders Chinese from the place down the street and they marathon sci fi movies over General Tsao’s and wanton soup. Jasper ends up sprawled across the couch on his back with his head in Monty's lap. Monty's hand rests on his chest, right in the center of him: a weight to keep him steady. And he knows, he knows he's steady. He feels safe.

*

That night, Jasper wakes suddenly in a room that is not his own. He’s cold, and there is something moving against the wall. He can't remember what woke him, but his muscles ache with the tension of keeping himself still, and his pulse hammers against the sensitive skin at his throat. Each uneven breath shakes in his lungs. He closes his eyes tight, then opens them again. Outside a car horn blares, the swish and rush of wheels against pavement follows, and he has to bite back a wave of terror like bile rising up in his throat.

The car passes by, and an undisturbed night-quiet descends once more, but his spinning thoughts won't still. He's still not sure where he is. He can't remember his dreams but they must have been nightmares. That’s why he’s in this state, poised on the dagger tip of dread, right on the edge and struggling to breathe.

He watches the unknown object in the corner, wafting, waving in the trembling night air that sifts in through the open window.

Jasper never sleeps with his windows open. When he pulls at the blanket, wanting to cover his shoulders and sink down into the depths, something next to him makes a low whining noise, and alarm bells start blaring in his head.

_Fuck._

_Fuck fuck **fuck**._

He turns around slowly, carefully and slowly, and finds himself staring at Monty's back. **_Monty_**. He recognizes him right away, at least: Monty and his soft gray t-shirt and his arm stretched up under the pillow, the outlines of his shoulder blades. The rest follows. Monty's apartment and his bedside table, the glass of water sitting next to his phone and a thin paperback book. Monty's open window, and Monty's overgrown fern with its gently waving triangle-leaves.

Jasper's heart is still pounding. He knows where he is but his body won't calm. Every system remains on high alert, his heart, his lungs, the dizziness in his brain—his palms are sweating. There is a triangle of sweat forming on his back. He might be dying. He cannot breathe.

What is left is the instinct to flee so he follows it, as if the death-terror that haunts him could ever be outrun. But he has to try because he can't lie one more moment beneath a blanket that suddenly seems to be suffocating him, one more minute next to Monty, listening to his steady, even breaths. He pulls himself upright as carefully as he can, then to his feet, and stumbles out of the bedroom and down the hall to the living room.

This room is quiet, too, and filled with shadows that he knows, he _knows_ , are nothing more than plants, but it's more open, and he feels at last capable of taking a few large, slow, steadying breaths and _trying_ to think. What has worked before? What has he done before to silence this screeching panic in his mind? He can't remember. He rubs at the back of his neck, then staggers over to the light switch, and flips it on.

Rationality, he knows, won't do a fucking thing. It doesn't matter that he’s alone in the room, that the door is locked, that he is safe. It doesn't matter that the shadows reveal themselves in the light to be only flowers, newly sprouted to welcome spring. It doesn't matter that the nightmares he cannot remember are no more than panic-blips in his own mind, no more real than the conversations he still has with her when he can't sleep, or the fantasies he spins out in which she walks right back through their door, back from the dead like the leaves on the trees after winter. He knows all of this.

He also knows the panic needs to run its course.

He walks slowly over to the couch, sits down, and bends forward with his elbows on his knees, his head in his hands, breathing slow. Will this never end? Not this shot of adrenaline and fear, but this cycle of fear—will he ever have a day when he and a boy he's really started to like can watch a movie and eat take out and end up leaning against each other and smiling a lot, until it's late, and the boy tells him he can just stay over, and they fall asleep side by side in the middle of a makeshift jungle, a day where the last thing he thinks before he slips off into sleep is _I can smell the plants, they smell so green_ —will he ever have a day like this that he does not pay for with a raw blast of fear and despair in the night? Will he ever know calm?

Jasper rubs hard at the corners of his eyes with the heels of his palms, until they hurt. When he pulls away his hands, he sees they are shining with tear tracks. He doesn't feel like he's crying. But he feels a bit—washed up and washed out, wrung dry, empty—like someone who has just been crying, and a lot. He wonders in a vague way what he looks like.

His phone is still sitting on Monty's coffee table, where he left it when they shuffled off to bed. He sniffs back the worst of the threatening tears, picks it up, and turns it around and around in one hand. Then he takes a deep breath, straightens up, and switches the phone to camera mode. 

He takes a single shot.

It's not the best photo he's ever taken, he decides as he leans forward with his forearms on his knees, staring at it. His face looks bleached out and ghost-pale in the glare of the flash, and the skin beneath his eyes has a bruised, purple sheen. His gaze is unflinching and terrified both. Staring at his own face unsettles him. He looks tired and afraid and lost. He looks like he's stranded in the middle of a long night, haunted beneath the electric glow of the overhead, lost in an unfamiliar room.

He hates it, but he can't stop staring.

Then the corner of his mouth quirks up. _It's unguarded. That's why I hate it. That's why I won't erase it._

His thumb hovers over his screen anyway, as if he might do just that, as if he might just delete it and then maybe throw his phone away and throw himself down and just— _give up_. But he won't. He turns his phone off and sets it down on the table, right where he left it before. He turns off the lights. He goes back to bed.

*

The next morning, he wakes to find that the window, open only a sliver last night, has been shoved open wide, letting in the sort of bracing blast of wind that comes only with the changing of the season. A long slanting ray of sun blankets the bed. Jasper groans and throws his arm over his eyes. Then he turns over to his right, away from the bright alarm of it, toward where Monty should be, opens his eyes and sees a tangled mess of blankets and an off-center pillow instead.

He grabs the pillow and curls his body around it and closes his eyes again.

He was having another dream, but he can't remember it. Only the tiniest scraps of images remain: a forest, a multitude of green, a breath-held sense of coming home. Every time he reaches out for one, it disintegrates in his grasp. He rubs at his eyes and decides to let it go.

The sound of measured, morning footsteps in the hall makes him stir, and he cracks open one eye just in time to see Monty in the doorway, hair sleep-tousled and his feet bare, gingerly holding two mugs of something hot. One is a yellow reminiscent of egg yolks and says _Trust Me I’m an Engineer_ in blocky blue letters. The other is black and reads—Jasper can just barely make out the words, obscured by Monty's fingers— _hack the system_ in a scribble of outsized white print.

When he notices Jasper looking at him, awake, he smiles the sort of lopsided, fuzzy, morning smile that can’t help coming off shy, steps into the room, and holds out the black mug. “Interested in a morning shot of caffeine?”

Jasper smiles back. The expression doesn’t feel as forced as he thought it would. He pulls himself up with a low, reluctant grown, edging into a sigh, and sits back against the headboard with his legs crossed, the blankets pulled haphazardly over him. “Can’t say no to an offer like that,” he answers.

Monty carefully hands over the mug as he comes to sit down on the other side of the bed, one knee bent and his leg beneath him, the other foot hanging down to the floor. His knee touches Jasper's knee. He takes a tentative sip of what Jasper can smell now is definitely coffee, deep and dark without milk, and asks, "Did you sleep well?"

It would be easy just to say yes. He almost does. But first he looks up and catches the expression on Monty's face, and sees that the casual, almost disinterested tone of his voice was a lie. He's watching Jasper with an unaccountable honesty, an uncompromising openness, hiding behind nothing, his fingers tentatively looped through the handle of his mug and his other hand holding it at the bottom, holding it steady, barely touching, and his gaze is so unwavering that Jasper can only watch him in return. Watch him and think, _I could capture this. If I had my camera, I could trap this moment here perfectly: the light expectant look on his face, the steady steadfast patience of his face._

Monty, asking nothing of him. Asking something so simple and so difficult of him.

 _Maybe he already knows_ , Jasper thinks, a thin high trill of paranoia in him. _Maybe he woke when I woke._

_Or maybe he's just unsure of this slow creeping intimacy, like vines crawling up around our limbs as we sleep._

He wishes he could catch this moment as he wished he could have taken Monty's photo last night, wishes he could have framed and frozen a handful of seconds that stand out sharp and clear to him even now but which he's sure Monty has forgotten already, left behind him as too meaningless and too small: the moment the bed first bounced beneath him as he fell down upon it, after brushing his teeth; and how he sighed so deep and rough the sound could almost have been mistaken for a laugh, at the end; how he stretched his arms up above his head and Jasper saw the jut of hip above his flannel pants and the long unknown underside of his arms and then the stretch of tendons at his neck as he turned, and looked at Jasper, and almost-smiled at him. But the gesture was too secret and too small to be rightly called a smile. It was a look suited only to a bedroom at night, bracketed by the sheen of dark outside and caught up in the pattern of shadows cast by the lamplight's glow.

Monty sips at his coffee again, and Jasper mirrors him, trying not to burn his tongue. He takes more sugar in his coffee than this. Monty, he assumes, takes none. But he remembered something of Jasper's preferences from their afternoons at the café and gave it his best try. And he's sitting here now patient with his bare ankle trapped beneath his leg, and he’s making Jasper want, somehow, to give it his best try, too.

"I woke up once," he admits. "Not sure what time."

Monty dips his gaze down, briefly. “Nightmares?” he asks.

“I don’t know. Probably, but nothing I can remember.” He runs his thumb over the jag of the _k_ on his mug. This moment cannot be contained, could not ever be even if he had his camera in his hands, because it must be lived. 

He understands that now. It does not frighten him.

Monty starts to say, “You could have—” and Jasper interrupts:

“It was a panic attack, actually.” His voice sounds too high and too loud, as if on the verge of some new panic itself. “I still get them. I’m still…going to get them.”

“I know.”

He reaches out one hand and lets it rest on Jasper’s knee: a gesture that asks nothing of him, a gesture like a pause button on every scattered, anxious thought he’s ever had. Monty’s palm is warm from holding on to his coffee mug. As Jasper watches, he curls his fingers in slightly. 

Maybe, Jasper thinks, this is his way of saying a whole collection of unspoken words: _you could have woken me up_ ; and _I know it will happen again, but it’s going to be okay;_ and _I’m not going to leave_.

“I’m glad I met you,” Jasper tells him, which is a pretty dorky, pretty stupid thing to say. But he’s trying to rebuild the part of him that knows how to tell the truth, the part that isn’t afraid to share what he’s thinking. The part that can reach out across the distances.

“Well, yeah,” Monty answers, around a bubble of kind-hearted laughter, as Jasper leans back to set his coffee mug down. “I’m glad I met you too.”

Because Monty is still holding his own mug, and it’s still almost full, and still hot, he can barely react when Jasper leans in and kisses him. The kiss lands gracelessly, just to the side of Monty’s mouth. Jasper feels the way he inhales, quiet and surprised, and he lets his hand rest against the side of Monty’s face, and they try again.

Monty tastes of black coffee, strongly brewed: a morning taste, a new-day-dawning sort of taste. Outside, the clouds are shifting, and the sun shining through the window passes patterns over them, a beauty of shifting light and warmth. He longs to be closer. But that will come in time. For now, the kiss unfurls like the leaves of Monty’s plants toward the sun, and he knows he is unfurling, too: something in him that was dormant a long winter is reaching out, waking up, coming alive again.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! Comments and feedback are always appreciated and replied to and you can also find me on [tumblr](http://kinetic-elaboration.tumblr.com/).


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